Sandra Howard speaks out against drugs

Sandra Howard

By Alice Thomson

12:05AM BST 07 Oct 2004

Every parent should be worried about drugs, Sandra Howard said yesterday in the first political speech of her life.

The audience was in tears after the Conservative leader's wife introduced two former drug addicts at a fringe meeting, praising their courage. Both had served prison sentences. Tricia Goacher, a former Sainsbury checkout worker, had seen her husband die of a heroin overdose; Tony Addison had been expelled from boarding school.

They both came off drugs with the help of Addaction, which offers rehabilitation for drug and alcohol abusers. Mrs Howard, who is a trustee of Addaction, is determined that Britain should increase tenfold the numbers of residential drug rehabilitation places - a new Tory policy announced by her husband this week.

She apologised for her shyness, saying: "There's only one speaker in our family and it isn't me." She admitted afterwards: "I've only ever done corny interviews before about how I met Michael, but this is about real life." Mrs Howard added: "If you see people at rock bottom, it's an instinct to want to help them up again."

A former Vogue model in the 1960s, she emphasised that she had no personal experience of drugs, but she said that she had been frightened, "like any parent" that her three children could become users. "Luckily they all seem all right. I'm pretty proud of them really," she added.

Speaking very quietly, without notes, she said: "There are children as young as 10, on the streets, who are users. There are children even younger in families where their carers are abusers."

Mrs Howard introduced Tricia, 42, who had been a drug addict for 20 years. "My husband and I lost everything, our house, our jobs. I ended up in prison. My life was all drugs," she said.

"In prison I made friends and learnt to laugh again. But I came out of prison and within a week I was sticking needles into myself. Two years later my husband was dead. A week later I was in hospital with septicaemia.

"I was finally offered rehab. I'd never met anyone before who had got clean unless they were dead. Now I work for Addaction," she said.

As she cried, Mrs Howard was there to reassure her.

Tony said he became addicted at 12. "There was peer pressure and curiosity," he said. Treatment, he explained, saved his life.

"I used to put a knife to my mother's throat for money. Now I've started to repair the damage. Today I run a building service. I'm a tax-paying person," he said to cheers and a hug from Mrs Howard.